Writing projects, whether fiction or nonfiction, are much like putting together a puzzle. The challenge, and the frustration, of writing any successful piece - a story, an essay, a poem - is figuring out how to best fit the pieces together to create a cohesive whole. You want your finished piece to be a complete picture, one that makes sense, and one that has all the elements that appeal to readers - flow, detail, color, nuance, and emotional impact. All of these elements are achieved through carefully crafted prose. Whether you are working a puzzle or writing a story, you know when you've placed a piece in the wrong spot. It just doesn't fit. It feels like an interruption rather than a part of the flow. In writing, you'll know when this happens because you'll stumble over it when you read it back. It won't roll off your tongue and it will feel out of place. If it feels out of place to you, you can be guaranteed it will feel out of place to your readers. Along with flow, puzzling out your writing also means finding the most strategic place to fit pieces so they have the greatest impact. It means shuffling your writing around, adding, deleting, rearranging, rewording, until you have the right combination that makes your story or essay or poem work as a whole. Sometimes a part of your writing may not need to be deleted if it feels wrong.
It may just need to be placed somewhere else. A descriptive passage, for instance, may feel intrusive in one place in a story because it's too disruptive to the action; but, in another place, it may feel just right because it provides needed detail during a natural pause in the story. So, when editing your writing, treat these bumps as possible arrangement problems rather than necessary deletions. If a part of your writing won't fit naturally no matter where you place it, that's a clear sign it needs to be deleted from the piece. But if you take your time, working at your writing like a puzzle, fitting and re-fitting pieces into strategic places that enhance your writing rather than detract from it, you will end up with a well-written, cohesive story, essay or poem that appears to readers as a complete whole rather than a collection of pieces. You will make the lines between your pieces disappear and the final product will be seamless writing that readers will easily and thankfully glide through.
